I remember, perhaps faultily, that they were still selling them in the early 1980’s as part of the SRO guitar speaker line. I couldn’t find anything about that, but did find the specification sheet: http://archives.telex.c…

Never mind. The SRO I’m thinking of was 18 inches, and although discontinued, EV still makes 18 inch speakers.

blueferretdog says: April 9, 20103:41 pm

We used that speaker in 1969 to build a bass cabinet for our band, we were careful to build an adequate enclosure, it had remarkable sound but it was extremely unwieldy to move. It was only used on “special occasions” as a result. I wish I knew what became of it. Back then the prevailing philosphy seemed to be bigger is better. I remember standing inside a PA tower at a festival, the lower port was that large. I did not remain inside when the music was playing, I value my hearing.

Actually, blueferretdog, even today many bassists think that bigger is better. So many people ask about 18″ speakers, and many use 15″ speakers, when tens in a good cabinet can do the job just as well.

It just shows that people continue to buy what companies sell. And companies won’t change till the buying habits change.

The larger the speaker, the worse it “beams” upper frequencies right down the middle. Bigger speakers lose most of the upper end when you aren’t right in front. Of course, a 30″ woofer isn’t gonna go very high anyway.

blueferretdog says: April 10, 20102:09 pm

Rick, I don’t know anything about Thiele and Small, but I seem to remember we consulted some books on speaker enclosures that had some formulas for calculating enclosure volume vs. speaker size, along with cabinet thickness and insulation. Audiophile cabinets were often packed with acoustic insulation(fiberglass) , “accoustic suspension” speakers were all the rage although I am uncertain what that meant, Other than the fact that the cabinet was very tightly sealed instead of allowing any reasonace through ports which later became popular. But I digress, what we wound up with was a cube about 5′ square. Given enough power one could “feel” the bass much like modern subwoofers, we still had to supplement it with more conventional cabinets to get any kind of definition to the sound. We called it thumper in polite company but had a much ruder name for it among ourselves.

And 30 years later, morons would be putting these things in their cars and blasting deep bass outside my apartment building at 2 a.m.

Toronto says: April 10, 20108:31 pm

John – it’s not just the bass, it’s the buzzing harmonics in their doors and mirrors and their internal organs (which I always hope are being liquidized at the moment.)

blueferretdog says: April 11, 20105:42 am

I think they like that feeling.

djkrugger says: July 7, 20105:20 pm

I don’t know what concept of bass people have here but i’d been in the design and manufacture of pa systems for over 20 years and there’s no such thing as the magic 10″ sub if you want lower response you need a bigger piston modern pa systems use direct 18″ for subs in 20-140hz(http://www.eaw.com/products/SB180z.html) 15″ for 140-400Hz 2″ compression drivers 400-20kHz. Resonator subs are more efficient but have higher distortion.